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Good Practice or Not - Add Wrapper for Custom Shell Aliases?

My question is whether it is good practice to include a unique wrapper phrase for custom commands and aliases.

For example, lets say I use the following command frequently:

apt update && apt upgrade -y && flatpak update

I want to save time by shortening this command. I want to alias it to the following command:

update

And lets say I also make up a command that calls a bash script to scrub all of of my zfs and btrfs pools:

scrub

Lets say I add 100 other aliases. Maybe I am overthinking it, but I feel there should be some easy way to distinguish these from native Unix commands. I feel there should be some abstraction layer.

My question is whether converting these commands into arguments behind a wrapper command is worth it.

For example, lets say my initials are “RK”. The above commands would become:

rk update``rk scrub

Then I could even create the following to list all of my subcommands and their uses:

rk --help

I would have no custom commands that exist outside of rk, so I add to total of one executable to my system.

I feel like this is the “cleaner” approach, but what do you think? Is this an antipattern? Is is just extra work?

hallettj ,
@hallettj@leminal.space avatar

Seems like a matter of preference, and I see the logic in it. I’ll mention that Nushell makes it easy to create custom shell functions that are invoked as sub-commands in this manner. www.nushell.sh/book/custom_commands.html#command-…

filister ,

What you described is a common practice to make oneself life easier.

If you want to write something like rk you would need to create a bash script and place it in your PATH so you can access it from there. It is fairly easy to do so, and you can back it up in GIT so that you have the latest version of the command line utility there. Even for the alias, I would say back it up in GIT, because you might lose them.

crime ,

an easier approach to start with would just be to namespace them all with your initials when you set them as aliases, like rk-update, rk-scrub — then you could tab-complete them instead of doing rk --help. way less to maintain (unless you’re adding aliases from a bunch of different sources, in which case you may have bigger problems)

bionicjoey ,

Personally I had to come to terms with the feeling that anything other than just running the raw commands will get me into trouble. I work on a lot of servers, and so I need to be able to rely on my shell knowledge even when my bashrc isn’t handy. So for me it became more about just remembering what software does what thing broadly, and then checking man for the finer details.

But for a single personal machine, script it however you want. Just be aware that you’ll start to build muscle memory for aliases and custom functions that won’t follow you to new machines.

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